Testing Innovations

Since 1991, NSS Labs has led the information security research and testing communities, providing unique and valuable information to IT decision-makers. NSS Labs firsts include:

• First evaluation criteria for intrusion detection and prevention systems.
• "Live Testing" methodology--the industry's most rigorous--providing accurate, real-world results of product effectiveness and performance against today's Internet threats.
• First database of detailed product coverage and exposure information for over 1,200 high and critical vulnerabilities.
• Testing products against evasions, the most critical and prevalent network security threat.
• Evaluation of "in-the-cloud" reputation services, a growing component of security products.
• Inclusion of three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations in reports to help IT professionals balance cost-risk tradeoffs.
• Comparisons of stated product performance to real-world performance.
• Evaluation of product effectiveness and performance using both default and tuned configurations to represent common deployment scenarios and highlight the range of protection.
• Determination of whether a product provides proactive or reactive protection through the measurement of the time to protect against new malware and mean block rate on malware download compared to execution.